1453 Quotes

“Perhaps no defensive structure summarized the truth of siege warfare in the ancient and medieval world as clearly as the walls of Constantinople. The city lived under siege for almost all its life; its defenses reflected the deepest character and history of the place, its mixture of confidence and fatalism, divine inspiration and practical skill, longevity and conservatism.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Instantly Mehmet had clarified the practice of Ottoman succession, which he was later to codify as a law of fratricide: “whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne, it behooves him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The Ottoman makeup was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation, and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam. One offered the abstract simplicity of the desert horizon, a portable worship that could be performed anywhere as long as you could see the sun, a direct contact with God, the other images, colors, and music, ravishing metaphors of the divine mystery designed to lead the soul to heaven. Both were equally intent on converting the world to their vision of God.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“It was the beauty of the liturgy in St. Sophia that converted Russia to Orthodoxy after a fact-finding mission from Kiev in the tenth century experienced the service and reported back: “we knew not whether we were in Heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour and beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that there God dwells among men.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The failure of Islam to take the city in 717 had far-reaching consequences. The collapse of Constantinople would have opened the way for a Muslim expansion into Europe that might have reshaped the whole future of the West; it remains one of the great “What ifs” of history. It blunted the first powerful onslaught of Islamic jihad that reached its high watermark fifteen years later at the other end of the Mediterranean when a Muslim force was defeated on the banks of the Loire, a mere 150 miles south of Paris.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“For fifty-three days their tiny force had confounded the might of the Ottoman army; they had faced down the heaviest bombardment in the Middle Ages from the largest cannon ever built – an estimated 5,000 shots and 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; they had resisted three full-scale assaults and dozens of skirmishes, killed unknown thousands of Ottoman soldiers, destroyed underground mines and siege towers, fought sea battles, conducted sorties and peace negotiations, and worked ceaselessly to erode the enemy’s morale – and they had come closer to success than they probably knew.”
― Roger Crowley, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

“Behind the Palace walls Mehmed indulged in an atypical pursuits of a tyrant: gardening, handicrafts and and a commissioning of the obscene frescos.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Mehmet had three clear objectives for his new fleet: to blockade the city, to attempt to force a way into the Horn, and to oppose any relieving fleet that might sail up the Marmara.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The lure of the Red Apple was dangled before the expectant gaze of the faithful. It was on these dual promises, so attractive to the tribal raider, of taking plunder while fulfilling the will of God, that Mehmet prepared his strike.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“and he prepared his elite professional household regiments: the infantry – the famous Janissaries – the cavalry regiments, and all the other attendant corps of gunners, armorers, bodyguards, and military police. These crack troops, paid regularly every three months and armed at the sultan’s expense, were all Christians largely from the Balkans, taken as children and converted to Islam. They owed their total loyalty to the sultan. Although few in number – probably no more than 5,000 infantry – they comprised the durable core of the Ottoman army.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“In January 1453 Mehmet ordered a test firing of the great gun outside his new royal palace at Edirne. The mighty bombard was hauled into position near the gate and the city was warned that the following day “the explosion and roar would be like thunder, lest anyone should be struck dumb by the unexpected shock or pregnant women might miscarry.” In the morning the cannon was primed with powder. A team of workmen lugged a giant stone ball into the mouth of the barrel and rolled it back down to sit snugly in front of the gunpowder chamber. A lighted taper was put to the touch hole. With a shattering roar and a cloud of smoke that hazed the sky, the mighty bullet was propelled across the open countryside for a mile before burying itself six feet down in the soft earth.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“He feared its potential to furnish a cause for endless war with Christian powers in the future. Captured, it would provide the centerpiece of the empire, “without it, or while it is as at present, nothing we have is safe, and we can hope for nothing additional.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The Orthodox, in reply, claimed that the addition was theologically untrue; that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, and to add the name of the Son was heretical. Such issues were the stuff of riots within Constantinople.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Flee from the papists as you would from a snake and from the flames of a fire. St. Mark Eugenicus, fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The man whom the Renaissance later presented as a monster of cruelty and perversion was a mass of contradictions. He was astute, brave, and highly impulsive – capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty, and acts of sudden kindness. He was moody and unpredictable, a bisexual who shunned close relationships, never forgave an insult, but who came to be loved for his pious foundations. The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“After 350 years the defeat at Varna extinguished the appetite in the West for crusading; never again would Christendom unite to try to drive the Muslims out of Europe.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a Western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a possibility that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet’s nature.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“When the Spaniard Pero Tafur visited, he found even the emperor’s palace “in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure … the city is sparsely populated … the inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot,” before adding with true Christian charity, “which is, however, not as bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The laws of Islam required mercy to conquered peoples, and the Ottomans ruled their subjects with a light hand that seemed frequently preferable to European feudalism.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen sometime around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living among tents and woodsmoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“In truth the Byzantines often preferred their settled Muslim neighbors, proximity with whom had bred a certain familiarity and respect over the centuries following the initial burst of holy war:”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The spirit of militant Islam suited the Turkish fighting spirit perfectly; the desire for plunder was legitimized by pious service to Allah.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“By the middle of the eleventh century a Turkish dynasty, the Seljuks, had emerged as sultans in Baghdad, and by its end the Islamic world, from Central Asia to Egypt, was largely ruled by Turks.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“At this crossroads the Christian city came to control the wealth of a huge hinterland. To the east, the riches of Central Asia could be funneled through the Bosphorus into the godowns of the imperial city: barbarian gold, furs, and slaves from Russia; caviar from the Black Sea; wax and salt, spices, ivory, amber, and pearls from the far Orient. To the south, routes led overland to the cities of the Middle East: Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad; and to the west, the sea lanes through the Dardanelles opened up the whole of the Mediterranean: the routes to Egypt and the Nile delta, the rich islands of Sicily and Crete, the Italian peninsula, and everything that lay beyond to the Gates of Gibraltar. Nearer to hand lay the timber, limestone, and marble to build a mighty city and all the resources to sustain it. The strange currents of the Bosphorus brought a rich seasonal harvest of fish, while the fields of European Thrace and the fertile lowlands of the Anatolian plateau provided olive oil, corn, and wine in rich abundance.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“So huge was the architecture of the conflict between Islam and Byzantium that no Muslim banners would be unfurled again before the city walls for another 650 years – a span of time greater than that separating us from 1453 – but prophecy decreed that they would return.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“It was the possibilities of this site – what it offered for trade, defense, and food – that made Constantinople the key to imperial destinies and brought so many armies to its gate. “The seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople,” wrote George Trapezuntios, “and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the Emperor of the whole earth.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Looking down on the scene in the spring of 1453 one would also be able to make out the fortified Genoese town of Galata, a tiny Italian city state on the far side of the Horn, and to see exactly where Europe ends.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West